‘We are the forgotten people’: the distres of Australia’s ‘invisible’ asylum seekers

Nearly 29,000 asylum seekers are in Australia on temporary bridging visas. These people may be free from detention but with many denied education, healthcare and the right to work they remain locked in desperate poverty and with no idea what their futures hold. A Guardian Australia investigation

Life and demise on a bridging visa

July nights were freezing. The barbecue, though, was warm, a bulwark against the cold of the descending dark.

Balan, a Tamil asylum seeker, had turned his intellect already to the night ahead. He knew he could not afford to operates a heater. He and his housemates needed to watch every dollar and wintertime was the hardest hour. The last electricity bill had run to hundreds of dollars they didnt have.

Quietly, as the shared dinner brought to an end, Balan gathered up the coals from the barbecue in a tin and carried them to his room. There he slept on the floor, next to the coals as they burned down. To keep the heat in, he closed the door behind him.

As he slept, the room filled with carbon monoxide.

In the morning, Balans friend, worried by his failure to appear for breakfast, pushed open the door. Balan had patently realised at some phase in the night that he needed to get off. He had constructed it halfway to the door before he collapsed.

The coals were still warm. But Balan was dead, killed by carbon monoxide gas poisoning.

The privation that contributed to Balans demise didnt occur in the straitened situation of a refugee camp, or on the borderlands of a war-torn region.

It happened in Sydney, to a human living legally in Australia on a bridging visa.

Today nearly 29,000 people live in Australia on a temporary permit to reside in the country known as a bridging visa E( BVE ). Yet they are the invisible. They live in the darkness, on the fringes of Australian society.

Bridging visa E is for people who have at some stage been judged to have been unlawfully in Australia. Typically they are granted to asylum seekers who have arrived by boat and have constructed claims for refugee protection. Balan was one of these, having fled the continuing and brutal persecution of the Tamil minority in post-civil war Sri Lanka.

BVEs can be valid for 28 days or up to three years. Hundreds of people have lived on rolling visas, one temporary solution after another, for more than five years.

Many cannot access healthcare somewhere around a third have no right to Australias publicly funded Medicare despite the fact that they may carry physical and mental scars from their homelands, their journeys and their initial incarceration under Australias policy of mandatory detention.

Many cannot legally run. The immigration department declined to answer the Guardians questions about how many bridging visa holders have the right to seek job. But datum from community organisations who work with asylum seekers found only about two-thirds of bridging visa holders have work rights despite a parliamentary bargain more than a year ago that they all be granted the right to earn a living.

Those without run rights are reliant on limited government welfare, the benevolence of friends and charity, or risking their autonomy taking cash-in-hand jobs in the underground economy.

A black market job offers some financial respite but leaves bridging visa holders vulnerable to exploitation by employers who may underpay them or refuse to pay them at all and threaten to ring immigration if they complain.

Delays caused by immigration department cutbacks, massive staff turnover rates and more-than-occasional bouts of bureaucratic incompetence mean asylum seekers often spend months waiting for new bridging visas to be granted months expended living in the shadowlands of no income , no supporting and no healthcare: no legal right to be in the country.

Parliament heard in February that at least 1, 400 people are in this position in Australia right now.

Several BVE holders report having to quit chores because the looming expiration of their visas means they can no longer run legally.

Indeed they say they face exploitation at every step: from real estate agents who charge exorbitant penalties for late rents to salesmen who charge usurious rates of credit on white goods.

And their progression to substantive visas has been hampered by government cuts to legal services. In 2014 the government removed access for BVE holders to immigration advice. Asylum seekers have been left to navigate the byzantine process of applying for substantive visas on their own, negotiating complex kinds in English for many their third or fourth language.

As a final imposition, bridging visa holders are required to live under a punitive code of behaviour that not only proscribes criminal activity already outlawed by ordinance but proscribes them from engaging in undefined disruptive activities that are inconsiderate[ or] disrespectful.

The proscriptions exist over and above the laws of the land but they require no charge to be laid , no proof , no proof.

One bridging visa holder has been incarcerated for more than two years for drinking a brew on a train.

For all of the hot and illuminate over Australias immigration policies, BVE holders are the neglect. Freed from the bonds of detention, they are, supposedly, the fortunate. Often their lives only puncture the public consciousness when they end.

In the early hours of the morning of 27 October 2015, an Iranian asylum seeker, Reza Alizadeh, hanged himself in a public stairwell at Brisbane airport. He had lived on a succession of bridging visas since 2013.

In the same month an Afghan, Khodayar Amini, defined himself on fire while on a video bellow with two refugee advocates. He said he feared being detained again.

In June, Raza, another Afghan, jumped in front of a Perth train. He was living on a bridging visa and had been interviewed by police a day earlier.

And in February of that year, Rezene Mebrahta Engeda drowned himself in the Maribyrnong river, reportedly because of concerns he was about to be deported back to Eritrea.

But those violent tragedies are the visible exceptions to the invisible regulation. Tens of thousands of others on bridging visas are trapped in a dispiriting cycle of hardscrabble survival.

During a six-month investigation, the Guardian fulfilled dozens of people living in Australia on bridging visas. Over shared snacks, while travelling, as they ran or relaxed, the men and women spoke nearly uniformly of the endless uncertainty of their existences, the grinding poverty of their situations, their separation from family and community, and their difficulties finding work or education to restart interrupted lives.

Dawood, an Afghan asylum seeker on a BVE, cannot travel to see his family, or be reunited with them in Australia. He has not assured his daughter since she was three months old . She asked him if he would be home for her fifth birthday :

My wife is screaming over the phone and asking me, When you come, when you come? I say, come next month, come next season, or come next year but four and a half years passes like that. You know, you cant “re fucking lying to” your child, she is little. I want to be besides her, to celebrate her birthday like every other parent. What I am going to do? They keep us in this situation. I will miss many more birthdays.

Ali Sadaat, an Iranian teen who was on a BVE, has been detained for two years and is now being held indefinitely on Christmas Island for drinking a brew on a develop :

I dont want to be without freedom. Pray for me. This is real. I cant see light at the end of the tunnel.

I was very disappointed. I went home and screamed for many days. I had no run rights , no study rights. I sat all day at home either thinking or screaming. Nothing to do.

Haleema, an Afghan Hazara, tells she cant afford to feed or clothe her children properly :

I cant buy fruit. I merely buy second-hand fruit, the rotten ones[ that] no one buy. If I buy rice, I cant buy bread. Most of the time I dedicate potato to my children. I cant buy anything else. I cant buy shoes and uniforms for my children going to school.

A Tamil asylum seeker, speaking on condition on anonymity, dreads being re-detained or deported :

We are scared to go and meet the government. We are frightened they will take us and deport us. We know that has happened to people we know. People go for a meeting with the department and they just never come back.

These are the voices of those rarely heard, the stories of those holding together an existence amid the shifting sand of a capricious regime: a unsparing present before an uncertain future.

Many in their situation are afraid to speak out. Doing so, they fear, will injury their claim to refugee status or lead to them being taken into detention. Others speak only on condition of anonymity, fearful that talking publicly will be viewed as a breach of the code of behaviour they regard as an oppression.

Every bridging visa holder knows of someone who went for a routine interview with the department and never came home, taken in for detention not only indefinite and capricious but unchallengeable.

We are the forgotten people, one BVE holder tells on a late-night outer-suburban develop. Everywhere here is heaven, he tells, gesturing out the window to the warmly illuminated homes outside. But “were living in” hell and no one sees, so no one cares.

Bridging visa holders had poor housing and went without essential items such as beds or refrigerators: An income below the poverty line has led to an overwhelming reliance on community organisations for food, garment and furniture. Being reliant on income support and not being permitted to work is, for many, felt as shameful and demoralising.

The lives of asylum seekers in the community are largely characterised by doubts about their futures and the processing of their claims, and potential impacts of constant policy changes.

This year Gillian Triggs, the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, said the holding of people for years on a succession of bridging visas was a very significant breach of basic human rights.

Really,[ it is] a failure to respect their right to assert the status of a refugee, she told. Its easy to demean people who dont yet have that status and we hold them for many many years without having decided their position.

The 31 -year-old fled Afghanistan after surviving a bomb explosion in Kabul. He lifts his trouser leg to expose a long, jagged scar on his left ankle. His only child, a son, was two when he left. The boy is now six. Reza says he never imagined he would not consider him for four years.

He pulls a phone from his shirt pocket and flicks through the images of the boy on its screen, his face briefly illuminating up at ensure his sons smiling face.

I miss him so much. I want to hug him but how hard this is. Reza wipes a tear from his eye and puts the phone away.

Everything in life has a stage, he tells, gazing at the floor. Ive missed a big part of my sons childhood. I miss his smile. I miss his playfulness. I missed how much he grew in four years.

The joy of raising small children is when they are little; you play with him. When he grows up he will find his own way in the world.

Those living in Australia on bridging visas “says hes” feel trapped in a cycle of temporary solutions, with no prospect of ensure family members again or being able to sponsor their relatives to Australia.

Zaman has not assured his wife and son for four years. He frets his son will not recognise him if he ever insures him again. And he doesnt know what relationship they could have after so long apart. For how long, we wait? For how long, be uncertain?

There is nothing more consolation than having your family besides you, he tells. If we were not desperate, I would not come this way[ by boat ]. Its very dangerous and it required a lot of gallantry.

Compounding the concerns of many about their separation is dread for the safety of their families. Many of the Hazara in Australia have family still living in volatile parts of Afghanistan, where the Taliban are dangerously resurgent. Last year was the deadliest year for the Hazara minority in Afghanistan since the depose of the Taliban in 2001.

Asylum seekers from that country monitor local media obsessively and say they are alarmed by regular the reporting of Hazara being dragged from bus at roadblocks and put to demise at the side of the road. In November seven Hazaras were killed on a roadside in southern Afghanistan, including a seven-year-old girl whose throat was slit by wire.

I also have a seven-year-old daughter, Rauf tells the Guardian. He comes from Damurda in Ghazni, the same village as those slain. I wonder, If they cant spare a child, how could they spare anyone?

The situation is similarly chaotic along Pakistans north-western frontier. Thousands of Hazara, exiled from Afghanistan, live in two fortified suburbs in Quetta, where the ethnic minority is regularly targeted by bomb attacks.

In the visitors room, dialogues are conducted in hushed tones, scarcely above a whisper. Friends, partners and advocates sit with detainees, leaning their heads close to listen. Through a double-glazed window in an adjacent room, a sullen security guard in khaki watches over all.

On the wall hangs a image: a petroleum drawing of a heart, with two arrows through it. The caption is strangely incongruous: My heart is opening wider. Love people being around me.

On the wall opposite, a poster bears the logo of Australian Human Rights Commission. In several languages, including English, it reads: People should be treated fairly in immigration detention centres.